characters volume three: meet aaji

leela bhat (once leela ketkar).. wife of the late yashwant bhat- my grandparents on my mothers side.. once residents of the dusty small town of amravati near nagpur in a large red house (which i remember only through fragmentary images- like the large arched window in the living room, or the really dark interiors, or playing cards in the tube light in the evenings or the courtyard that it enclosed.)

mother of three children- usha- my aunt, anita- my mother and hemant- my uncle. as their children moved to mumbai the large red house soon was subdivided and sold as aaji and baba moved to a small flat easily accessible from both their son hemants’ and our places.

one of the original ngo women, aaji spends almost all her time imagining new ways of generating funding for a womens and childrens development organization in amravati- ‘vanita samaj’. they run a clinic and a school of the underprivileged and she is always looking for sources of funding. using every trick that grandmothers know to get their way- including emotional blackmail, anger, begging she manages to collect enviable amounts for the place. the entire family is involved in one way or the other in the collection of funds. i help in some of the letter writing.

when she is not collecting money for the vanita samaj she is busy imagining ways of getting all the grandchildren married. now that rahul (my elder cousin) is set, i am next in line and am a perpetual disappointment to her in not willing to tie the knot to some pretty marathi girl. though i remember falling for her powers of persuasion once and spending an evening walking anti clockwise 4 times around shivaji park with one eligible bachelorette making small talk about small things. since then i have suitably avoided any such situations sometimes awkwardly, sometimes skillfully.

an amazing networker, she is able to trace my family to the most obscure areas of the world.. she has already shown that there is absolutely every single state of the country represented in the far reaches of the branches of the family tree. my father insists that she will be able to show exactly how bill clinton is related to us is she needs to.

his '‘out-law’' he calls her.

great cook- as we all insist our grandmothers are, her speciality- at least to me- being the mango pickle that is packed in many jars in late summer for distribution to the family.

she takes a walk every evening and is flirted with by every man in the neighbourhood. one in particular being the young parsi man with tight shorts and t-shirt and a few labradors who insists that he is her boyfriend and calls her 'leela'- much to her amusement.

she loves the event of a ritual but does not care for the religious reason for its existence- secular, liberal, energetic, a lover of music, reading and culture as much as my grandfather was.

from the stories i hear it seems like there were musicians and books streaming through the amravati house perpetually. the stories also include snippets of a life in a small town- the dogs that were so devoted that they followed the car home from kilometers away, the well in the compound where everyone learnt swimming by being thrown into the pool by her brother who lived close by, and so many more.

i have a strange proxy nostalgia for all of these images that i have never experienced myself but can see the spaces where they happened. i love the stories- i make them part of my heritage.